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Scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in
Geneva were cheered like rock stars on July 4 when they formally
announced that they had almost certainly nabbed the biggest
and most elusive catch in modern physics: the Higgs boson.

Dubbed the "God particle," the Higgs boson is "the missing
cornerstone of particle physics," said
CERN director Rolf Heuer. This "milestone in our
understanding of nature" essentially confirms that the
universe was formed the way scientists believe it was.

Two teams of atom-smashing researchers at CERN's Large Hadron
Collider independently verified, with 99.99997 percent certainty,
the new subatomic particle, which is a near-perfect fit for what
physicists have expected of the Higgs boson since its existence
was first theorized 48 years ago.

"It's the Higgs," British physicist Jim
Al-Khalili tells Reuters. "The announcement
from CERN is even more definitive and clear-cut than most of us
expected. Nobel prizes all round." So what does this all mean,
and where does it leave us? Here, four questions answered about
the God particle:

1. Why is this such a big deal?Finding a
Higgs-like boson validates much of how scientists believe the
universe was formed. The media calls the Higgs boson the God
particle because, according to the theory laid out by Scottish
physicist Peter Higgs and others in 1964, it's the physical proof
of an invisible, universe-wide field that gave mass to all matter
right after the Big Bang, forcing particles to coalesce into
stars, planets, and everything else. If the Higgs field, and
Higgs boson, didn't exist, the dominant Standard Model of
particle physics would be wrong. "There's no understating the
significance" of this discovery: says
Jeffrey Kluger at TIME. "No Higgs, no mass; no
mass, no you, me, or anything else."

2. Have they found the Higgs boson, or something
else?As momentous as this discovery is, "missing
entirely from all of the high-fives and huzzahs today was a
single, tiny word: 'the,'" says TIME's
Kluger. Instead of claiming to have found
"the Higgs boson," the scientists were only willing
to say they'd found "a Higgs." That's pretty
typical of "the most skeptical profession on
earth," says
Martin White at Australia's The Conversation.
But scientists have been busy on theories that "may one day
supersede the Standard Model," and many of them do "predict more
than one Higgs boson," each with different masses, energy levels,
and other attributes. If this new discovery turns out to be "an
exotic Higgs rather than the common garden variety," that will be
"as popular as it would be earth-shattering."

3. Who gets the Nobel prize?This Higgs
breakthrough is "good news for physicists, but one dreadful
headache for the Nobel committee," says
Ian Sample in Britain's The Guardian.
Traditionally, each Nobel prize in the sciences is awarded to no
more than three individuals, but literally thousands of people
made this new discovery possible. "All deserve credit," but even
the leaders of the CERN teams should hold off on writing their
acceptance speeches: The likely laureates will be Peter Higgs and
two of the other four living theoretical physicists whose
50-year-old work was just validated. This isn't the first time
the Nobel judges have faced this quandary: "Restricting those
honored with a Nobel helps maintain their prestige. But in modern
science, few discoveries are born in final form from so few
parents."

4. What does this discovery mean
for me?Unless you're a physicist,
you probably still have no idea what the Higgs boson is — I
don't, says
Robert Wright at The Atlantic. So why should
you care about this discovery? Well, it's an important step
toward a possible understanding of how the universe formed —
pretty interesting stuff — but the very fact that we don't really
get it "means we should all try to have some intellectual
humility, especially when opining on grand philosophical matters,
because the thing we're using to try to understand the world —
the human brain — is, in the grand scheme of things, a pretty
crude instrument." On a more practical note, "the massive
scientific effort" that led to the Higgs discovery has already
changed your life, says TheAssociated
Press. CERN scientists developed the World Wide Web "to
make it easier to exchange information among one another."